A researcher for the National Institute for Oncology and Radiobiology is pressured and prevented from fully carrying out his work. He’s threats from State Security and Director.

Oscar
Antonio Casanella Saint-Blancard, bio-chemist, researcher for the National
Institute for Oncology and Radiobiology, speaks of how he is pressured and
prevented from fully carrying out his work because of his friendship with
dissidents.

It all started because
of a party for his best friend, Ciro Diaz, at the end of 2013. Ciro Diaz,
besides being a graduate in Mathematics from the University of Havana, has just
one remarkable characteristic: He is a dissident and member of the band Porno
for Ricardo. Soon came the threats from State Security to make him a prisoner
if he engaged in the activity.

Then came the accusations
at work of his being “mercenary” and “annexationist*.” But at no time was this
young man, a bio-chemist by profession, intimidated, and he resisted the wishes
of his oppressors. Oscar Antonio Casanella Saint-Blancard has kept his ties of
friendship with Ciro and other opposition figures.

Oscar Antonio
Casanella Saint-Blancard, bio-chemist, researcher for the National Institute
for Oncology and Radiobiology

Casanella made his case
known to the independent project Estado de Sats and was also arrested during
the wave of repression unleashed by the performance by activist and artist
Tania Bruguera at the end of last year. Since that time his harassment by State
Security has continued, principally at his place of employment: The National
Institute for Oncology and Radio-biology (INOR) where he serves as a
researcher.

We talked about his
current work situation and the plight of the Cuban health system. In spite of
the difficulties he has lived through, Oscar has never lost his smile, and he
maintains the same composure as always, which has led to his repressors to try
to corner him.

What situation are you
in right now?

Right now I am
subjected to psychological warfare in the workplace. Not just me, but also my
co-workers, and it hurts me more for them than for myself because I have
already overcome my fear, but my colleagues have not.

What does the
psychological warfare consist of?

The doctor and deputy
director of research for INOR, Lorenzo Anasagasti Angulo, has been pressuring
and coercing my co-workers, above all the laboratory managers, to not let me
into the various labs of the Center. He explains that there is a labor rule
that says that access to these places is restricted, and that is true, but it
only applies in my case, because the other researchers enter and exit the
various labs without any restriction, while my access is impeded. I think I am
treated very differently and discriminated against.

That is not the only
thing that has happened to you…

Before this, in June of
this year, I prepared a course on Bio-computing for students at the University
of Havana and researchers from the INOR, and after my immediate boss had
approved it, even though teaching personnel had reserved a hall for me to teach
the classes, when this was all coordinated with the Biology Faculty so that
students of that school could receive this training, this gentleman, Lorenzo
Anasagasti Angulo, did not give me the authorization to teach the class.

But it did not stop
there, he also coerced many employees of the Oncology Institute to not attend
the course, and he has told them on more than one occasion not to talk to me.
All these actions were not enough for him, and he told me: “Oscar, get this
into your head; I am going to make sure that you have no future in this
institution and I am going to make everything as difficult for you as I can.”

This gentleman,
together with a member of the Communist Party from the Pedro Fernandez Cabezas
Institute, has threatened to expel me from the Center just because of my ties
with opposition figures. Also, Anasagasti has pressured my colleagues to
deliver the copy of the lawsuit and letter that I sent to Raul Castro where I
reveal the articles and laws so violated by the State Security officers, agents
of the PNR and members of the PCC and where I demand the President of the
country leave me in peace.

National Institute for Oncology and
Radio-biology (INOR)La Habana,Cuba

The deputy director
asked my colleagues to destroy all this documentation and said that it was
“enemy propaganda.” So, to demand adherence to Cubans laws is, according to
Doctor Anasagasti, “enemy propaganda.”

As if that were not
enough, just a month ago Lorenzo Anasagasti appeared with two State Security
officers at the home of Doctor Carlos Vazquez, head of the Board of the
Oncological Tumor Devices, in order to sound him out and tell him in a
threatening tone: “We’re checking up on you.”

Lorenzo Anasagasti is a
collaborator with the repressors, which makes him another repressor who
occupies a job at the Institute of Health which has nothing to do with these
issues. This is a person in service to the Cuban political police and for him
that function is more important than the professional development and education
of the INOR. This gentleman has demonstrated that he prefers no thesis be
carried out if I participate in the statistical analysis of an academic project
in the Institute.

I also am a Molecular
Biology teacher for a module that is taught to doctors, who are specializing in
Oncology, and I have to interact with a person who coordinates that course, but
Anasagasti has demanded that person prohibit me from accessing his laboratory
and pressured him to not even talk to me. In this way the interaction between
researchers and workers, so necessary to offering high quality training for the
country’s future oncologists, is made more difficult. The development and
quality of teaching are sacrificed for the sake of repression.

Some foreign mission
doctors are familiar with the dispossession of their fees by the Cuban
government, and they justify it on the grounds that the country invests that
money primarily in oncology resources. What is your opinion of this matter? Do
you believe that is really so?

It is true that cancer treatments
are expensive anywhere in the world and that, for being an underdeveloped
country, the country’s situation is not one of the worst. But really the duties
that the doctors, researchers, nurses and service personnel perform does not
correspond at all with the wages that they earn and the conditions under which
they work.

Currently the volume of
patients seen in Cuba by a single doctor is abusive. It is a situation that
affects the doctor as well as the cancer patient, who has to wait long hours to
be seen, and now the quality of the attention and treatment is not the same.
This is mainly due to a stampede, a very big exodus of professionals to the
outside, and this causes a work overload for those who remain, although those
from the INOR who emigrate the most are the recent graduates, not doctors, who
barely stay two years between their graduation and their exit abroad.

I worked some years ago
on research about brain tumors and, of the specialists who carried out the
research with me, all left the country. There was one point when INOR had no
neurosurgeons or neurologists. Another interesting element is that when I
started to work at the Institute in 2004, there was free internet access for
all researchers, and the situation, 11 years later, is very different. In my
department I do not have access to the internet, and I work in Bio-computing.
They have restricted access to the internet only for department and laboratory
heads, but there is less access than there was 11 years ago.

In spite of the promises
that the Government has made to doctors about economic improvements like better
wages, the chance to buy a car, a laptop, etc., several of the doctors at my
workplace are very pessimistic, because they listened to the words of
Chancellor Bruno Rodriguez Parrilla at the press conference about the embargo
on September 16, which confirmed that Cuba was not going to change its internal
politics. “Maybe I improve my life, but
my relatives who are not doctors are going to continue with the same
deprivations,” one of them told me. That’s why they have decided to abandon
the country at the first opportunity that is presented.

*Translator’s note: An
“annexationist” is someone who advocates Cuba becoming a part of the United
States.